About Steve's website

History

In September 2003, I realized that my ISP provided me with a small amount of free web space,
so I learned a little HTML and started fooling around with a homepage.
It was text only for a very short time (as seen at top right), but I soon added images.
I had just started taking digital photos,
and used my site for posting photos but little else.
Once I added images, the look of my homepage (middle right) and of my other web pages
remained largely unchanged until 2009.
I got the domain name nesssoftware.com and a bunch of space in 2009,
so I moved my website and started uploading lots of data.
I learned enough CSS, PHP, and MYSQL to write active content.

My website still consists mostly of photos, at least in terms of space,
but lately I'm writing many more non-photo pages.
As of September 2017, my homepage links to almost 100 other pages, as listed here.
There are many, many other pages too,
many generated dynamically rather than by hand.
All of my digital photos (about 30,000, accessible through over 700 index pages)
and almost all of my dad's 35mm slides (about 3,000, 150 index pages) are online too.
Photos are searchable by tag, though pre-2009 photos remain mostly untagged.
The web-accessible material uses almost 100 GB, much it for photos.

I have generally found consulting work through personal contacts,
so the Ness Software Works portion of my website is very thin.
It contains a fairly current résumé and some document links but nothing else.

When my brother David died in 2006, I posted a copy of his website
on my web space for archival purposes.
I thought Comcast would remove his website
as soon as he stopped paying his cable bill.
His original site
remained up and running for more than four years
after his death, but now it's gone.
My web space also hosts my son Alexander's website.

Philosophy

I care more about content than about presentation,
and often I'm more interested in figuring out how to do something
than in the result of doing it.
As I result, I write pages using a simple text editor, not with an HTML editor.
I've always been a big fan of standards and portability,
so I try to keep pages compliant with W3C standards;
the little W3C icons at the bottom of each page are mostly a convenience
for me, letting me find bugs during composition.

Old homepages

I have kept archival copies of my earlier homepages.
but due to subsequent website reorganization
thumbnails are likely to be missing
and links probably won't work in the old homepages as preserved here.

Old pages

I almost never delete an old page,
though I occasionally tinker:
convert HTML to PHP, add links to newer pages,
ensure W3C compliance, and so on.
A few very old pages survive almost unchanged since 2003.
Some are in serious need of updating.

Current homepage

My current homepage is written in PHP.
The original version (bottom right) just used pure portable CSS and HTML
(no Java or Javascript),
but in 2017 I added a slideshow that uses Javascript.
Thanks to Eric Meyer for the CSS popup idea.